Measuring selected PPCPs in wastewater to estimate the population in different cities in China

Abstract

Sampling and analysis of wastewater from municipal wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) has become a useful tool for understanding exposure to chemicals. Both wastewater based studies and management and planning of the catchment require information on catchment population in the time of monitoring. Recently, a model has been developed and calibrated using selected pharmaceutical and personal care products (PPCPs) measured in influent wastewater for estimating population in different catchments in Australia. The present study aimed at evaluating the feasibility of utilizing this population estimation approach in China. Twenty-four hour composite influent samples were collected from 31 WWTPs in 17 cities with catchment sizes from 200,000-3,450,000 people representing all seven regions of China. The samples were analyzed for 19 PPCPs using liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry in direct injection mode. Eight chemicals were detected in more than 50% of the samples. Significant positive correlations were found between individual PPCP mass loads and population estimates provided by WWTP operators. Using the PPCP mass load modeling approach calibrated with WWTP operator data, we estimated the population size of each catchment with good agreement with WWTP operator values (between 50-200% for all sites and 75-125% for 23 of the 31 sites). Overall, despite much lower detection and relatively high heterogeneity in PPCP consumption across China the model provided a good estimate of the population contributing to a given wastewater sample. Wastewater analysis could also provide objective PPCP consumption status in China.

Removal of Pharmaceutical and Personal Care Products (PPCPs) from Municipal Waste Water with Integrated Membrane Systems, MBR-RO/NF

“…Caffeine was present in the highest concentration (33.7 μg/L) making it in agreement with concentrations presented by other authors [ 33 , 34 ]. The reason is that caffeine is widely distributed in coffee, tea and other beverages, and flow into sewage with residue [ 35 ]. Macrolide antibiotics are largely excreted into sewage in their unchanged forms at excretion rates greater than 60% and they are usually found in wastewater at high concentrations [ 30 ].…”

Discovery of large molecules as new biomarkers in wastewater using environmental proteomics and suitable polymer probes

“…Whereas successful studies have been mostly carried out in the chemical exposure side, namely, the consumption of illegal drugs (Mastroianni et al, 2017;Thomas et al, 2012), pharmaceuticals and personal care products (Burgard et al, 2014;Gao et al, 2016), tobacco (Castiglioni et al, 2015;Ryu et al, 2016b) and alcohol use (Ryu et al, 2016a), pesticide exposure (Rousis et al, 2017), etc., and on genetic biomarkers (Ahmed et al, 2020;Yang et al, 2017), studies aimed at characterizing wastewater metabolomics and proteomics (i.e., the biological response side) are lacking. Even though several biomarkers have been proposed for that purpose, notably protein biomarkers, to the best of our knowledge, no systematic studies on wastewater proteomics have been published (Rice and Kasprzyk-Hordern, 2019).…”

Monitoring wastewater for assessing community health: Sewage Chemical-Information Mining (SCIM)

“…The aspect of BioSCIM and sewage epidemiology that has attracted the most attention is the need to estimate small-area population size via the use of either chemical markers or biomarkers. New studies on this aspect are limited (i.e., Castiglioni et al, 2013 ; Chen et al, 2014 ; Gao et al, 2016 ; González-Mariño et al, 2017 ; Lai et al, 2015 ; Nakada et al, 2017 ; O’Brien et al, 2017 ; O’Brien et al, 2014 ; Rico et al, 2017 ; Senta et al, 2015 ; Thai et al, 2014 ; Zheng et al, 2017 ); note, however, that non-chemical-based approaches are also being explored (e.g., Thomas et al, 2017 ). This is important because the overall levels of markers in sewage often must be normalized, and calculation of per capita contributions is one widely accepted approach.…”